The Use of Technology in Language Teaching

Now that ELT professionals are dealing with students belonging to the Net Generation, it is important to bear in mind the fact that teachers can personalize student learning by using language teaching webpages for this purpose. As Jamshed N. Lam pointed out in an article on http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/techinclass/, “The online learning enhances the traditional textbook and gives students a personal connection to native (…) speakers.” Now that question is “how can technology be used to improve students’ aural and oral skills?” Let us venture some potential answers to this query.

Students must develop a series of skills to become successful language learners. One of these skills is the increase of their aural perception to enhance listening comprehension. By using audio web-pages, language teachers can offer students samples to illustrate areas to improve, such as accent understanding or sound discrimination (consonants and vowels). Besides, these audio web-pages provide tutorials and self-quizzes that can assist students in their personal learning and can maximize their own learning by expanding the contents that are presented in class by language instructors.

On the other hand, we have “oral skills” that balance sound perception and recognition. Helpful online materials supplement in-class activities and assist learners to work on their own learning pace. For instance, language instructors can make use of pronunciation sites on articulatory phonetics that can help students see what happens in their mouth and replicate what they actually see; consequently, sound production can be practiced by each individual at home or elsewhere. Audio sites also give us the opportunity to provide interactive exercises in which students must practice rhythm and intonation, as well as word linking and minimal pairs. As Thad Polk, professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan pointed out (http://www.crlt.umich.edu/inst/techexamples.php#Onlinetools), “software, freeware, and web-based materials” can be used to have students “explore course-related topics in depth and test their understanding of these topics,” and all this can be possible thanks to the available resources on the Internet.

To conclude, by means of a blog, which can then become the webpage for a single course at a university or class at a school, teachers can now create an “online syllabi” –a group of related links with all kinds of free online tools to help students work on their own learning-. By doing this, and with the help of blogging services such as www.blogger.com, the personalization of learning can be possible: aural and oral skills can be worked outside the classroom with the proper guidance of the instructor even though there is no computer lab in our school or teaching place.

Useful websites for the use of technology in teaching:

http://lc.ust.hk/~material/pl/u1.htm

http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/teachwtech/

http://4teachers.org/inttech/index.php?inttechid=ta

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/technlgy/te800.htm#researchresult

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/inst/techexamples.php#Onlinetools

http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/design_site/have_on_it/

(My personal reflection on Technology and Language Teaching, taken and edited from Building Teaching Skills W2010, University of Oregon, American English Institute)

Monday, January 25, 2010